Storm and Stress

It arrived, just as the meteorologist predicted, like a meteorological marauder, like an atmospheric Visigoth, the storm, a screaming knot of near-hurricane energy, pushing before it the alluvium of destruction and grief it had caused in its getting here, depositing it in my town, in my neighborhood, at my house, that splotch of angry red on the dual polarization radar now transfigured from image to clamor and blast, from pixel to furying rain, to howling straight-line winds, to hail, like a fusillade of miniballs, battering roof and window.    

The town’s warning siren sounded, and Kathy and I scurried to the basement.  We listened to the storm’s roaring monologue.  There is nothing baroque about the language of such a storm: it speaks the tongue of sheer and indifferent power.  Pulling a chair under a north-facing window, I stood and watched the wind thresh the trees.  This was no west wind like the poet Shelley described, one to quicken dead thoughts.  At 85 miles per hour, with peak gusts reaching near 100, the wind quickened only dread thoughts.

In his “Personal Narrative,” Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards confesses that he “used to be uncommonly terrified” of storms.  After his conversion to a “divine sense” of things, however, such storms “rejoiced” him, he “felt God” when they appeared, heard in them God’s  “majestic and awful voice.  I can muster no such faith; the voice I hear hammers in the mouth of the sky like a mad bell clapper.  The storm does not rejoice me; it stresses me—“sturm and drang,” literally.

Why my heart-plunging apprehension, my stomach-pit-churning alarm?  I’ve been through this before.    I own a heavily treed double lot.  The trees are very old, very large, and very tall; they have very large branches; they surround my house and line the backyard and back lot. Any storm categorized as severe can, and has, caused damage to those trees, sometimes minor, sometimes extensive, and almost always requiring the use of a chainsaw to clear—a tool that I’ve never been entirely comfortable using, not from fear so much as wariness, the tense awareness of the potential jeopardy involved in wading chainsaw-laden into a mass of entangled limbs.

I worry about structural damage to the house and roof should one of those very old, very large trees fall on my house.  I cannot blot from my memory the many news stories I have seen of houses crushed by uprooted trees, of families suddenly homeless, their lives suddenly measured by droppers, by thimbles and teaspoons, robbed by chance, by freakish accident, by blind randomness, of the domestic rituals and familiar routines that tame time, allow us to dwell in it and, in a manner, control its always onward passing.  

And then there is the banditry of time and stamina in cleaning up.  The chainsaw hangs heavy in the hands, wearying arms and shoulders.  Backs ache with bending.  Legs grow leaden.  Branches are trimmed, sawed; often they must be leveraged into a safe position for cutting to prevent the saw chain from binding or the fall of other, intertwined branches.  The resulting debris must be hauled to the curb and stacked in manageable piles for a city crew to pick up.  Another near hurricane several years ago struck my property like a detonation, damaging at least a dozen trees and taking me three weeks of after-work and weekend labor to clear.  This most recent storm, the one that bivouacked Kathy and me in the basement, would be mild by comparison: it sundered a multitrunk maple in the back lot, casting half of one of the 100-foot trunks and a 20-foot branch to the ground, and costing me a day and a half of toil on sodden ground to clean up.  There is no grace in this work, no heralding mystery, nothing especially affirmative.  It is only strength-pillaging, time-vandalizing drudgery.  As the poet Rilke says, “Endurance is everything.”

Huddled in the basement, waiting for the storm’s tick to tock, I realize I have no capacity for anything but huddling; nothing to do but hoard my foreboding.  There is no negotiation with reality here: I am caught up in the dynamics of implacable and impersonal forces, at the mercy of temperature changes, of high and low pressure gradients, of warm and cold air convection.  I can do nothing but seek shelter, feel a hectoring apprehension, and ponder a basic arithmetic question: what, when it’s over and I step outside, will it all add up to?  To what will I be commandeered? 

And then I will begin, again.